Father-Born: Mediating the Classics in J.M. Coetzee's Foe

Radhika Jones

So we arrive at a certain paradox. The classic defines itself by surviving. Therefore the interrogation of the classic, no matter how hostile, is part of the history of the classic, inevitable and even to be welcomed. For as long as the classic needs to be protected from attack, it can never prove itself classic.

One might even venture further along this road to say that the function of criticism is defined by the classic: criticism is that which is duty-bound to interrogate the classic. Thus the fear that the classic will not survive the decentering acts of criticism may be turned on its head: rather than being the foe of the classic, criticism, and indeed criticism of the most skeptical kind, may be what the classic uses to define itself and ensure its survival. Criticism may in that sense be one of the instruments of the cunning of history.

—J. M. Coetzee, “What Is a Classic?” (16)

I

J.M. COETZEE'S fourth novel, Foe (1986), is a rewriting of
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, with
the notable addition of two central characters: a female narrator, Susan
Barton, and a male author, Mr. Foe, who is planning to fashion Susan’s castaway
tale into a novel. Their disagreement over how this tale will ultimately take
shape is the central conflict of Coetzee’s novel. If Robinson Crusoe is a protonovel about individual survival in a
remote and uncivilized world, then Foe
is a novel about the challenge of presenting such a survival story to a city of
metropolitan consumers of literature, those who, though they may themselves be
metaphysically stranded, live among multitudes.

Coetzee,
a South African writer who now lives in Australia, has throughout his career
been attuned to the uses of literary heritage, engaging openly with
the authors whose sensibilities inform his own. In addition to Defoe, Kafka and
Dostoyevsky resonate explicitly in his early work, particularly in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and
the Life and Times of Michael K
(1983). With Foe, however, Coetzee
attained a lyricism that separates this novel from his other works even as it
“made canonic intertextuality a fundamental principle” (Attridge 69). He also
laid claim to a powerful motif. Robinson Crusoe and Friday are, after all,
totemic figures in literature as models of an encounter between the perceived
anthropological extremes of human experience: civilization and savagery,
enlightened and unenlightened.

Coetzee
has summed up Foe in terms of authority
and its literary counterpart, authorship: “My novel Foe, if it is about any single subject, is about authorship: about
what it means to be an author not only in the professional sense (the
profession of author was just beginning to mean something in Daniel Defoe’s
day) but also in a sense that verges, if not on the divine, then at least on
the demiurgic: sole author, sole creator” (“Speaking in Tongues” par. 26).
Thus, writing is the novel’s chief mechanism of plot. Coetzee’s novel alters
Defoe’s story, then probes the narrative implications of altering a story, of
determining where it begins, where it ends, and what material is worthy of
inclusion. In so doing, it exemplifies the singular paradox of the rewriting as
a subgenre. In pinning a classic to the board to examine and reimagine it, more
often than not the writer engenders a plot in which recognizably canonical
books are dreamed up but never realized, or realized only in radically altered
forms. They give the impression of being fragile, ephemeral things—the
very opposite of what we think of as a classic, one that feeds on criticism and
resists the caprices of changing times and tastes. In this setting, the classic
is a book that, if it exists, does so only by chance, in the context of many
other possible books, and at grave risk of imminent disappearance. In her
vision of the castaway tale’s narrative structure, Susan refers to Friday’s
muteness and lack of language as “a puzzle or hole in the narrative” (121), the
absence at its center. In the same way, the book she desires—the evidence
of her own trauma, translated into a book for the masses—is the absence
at the center of Foe. For in the
rewriting mode, classic stories are established by their absences and by their
inability to attain authority or completion.

The
canonical rewritings like Foe that
have emerged in the last three decades are informed not only by their literary
forebears but in a meta-literary fashion by the canon wars of the 1970s and
'80s and the critical advances during that time in postcolonialism and gender
studies. It has become conventional wisdom, thanks in part to Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin's influential primer The Empire Writes Back, to read such rewritings chiefly as
resistance texts, arguing (along postcolonial or gender lines) against the
prevailing canon. I contend that the opposite is true, that contemporary
rewritings such as Foe are actually
our most canonical texts, for they take canonicity as both their inventive
premise and their textual subject. They do not reify the canon so much as they
presuppose it; far from resisting, they plot its inevitability. However, they
also show the arbitrary and precarious nature of composition, publication, and
literary permanence, making the canon into an entity that is penetrable and
subject to infinite mutations from within. In this essay, I argue that Foe, with its treatment of literary
concerns through the rewriting mode, acts as a parable of canonical reading and
rereading, shedding light on Coetzee’s conception of the labor of writing, the
realities of achieving canonicity, and the project of rewriting novels,
canonical and otherwise.

II

Above
all else, Foe is a dialogue,
conducted mostly in letters. But since for much of the novel the reader sees
only one side of the correspondence, it begins with the impression of an
extended monologue. The writer of the letters for all but the final section is
a former castaway, Susan Barton, but, as the initial quotation marks in the
novel signify, she is not telling her tale directly to the reader; the bulk of
her story is inset within another medium. Five pages in, we gain our first
intimation of Susan’s intended recipient, as well as the clue that she has
already communicated to him some of her story: a parenthetical aside describes
the stranger she encounters on the island as “of course the Cruso I told you
of,” which confirms that this letter is not her first (9).It is not until the
second chapter, however, that we learn the object of Susan’s direct address: a
man called Mr. Foe, “the author who had heard many confessions” during her
effort to convince him to give her island saga the literary treatment she, an
amateur, cannot manage herself (48).

Susan’s
letters set the stage for the novel’s twists on genre and form, as she recounts
for Foe not only her own experience in coming to the West Indian island and
surviving its isolation but also the tales she hears there from and about her
companions, Friday and Cruso, and the stories she tells them. Rather than
offering a simple frame narrative, Coetzee allows the circles to overlap,
creating series of repetitions. A striking example occurs at the beginning of
the book. The narrative opens with a description of the shipwrecked Susan
having reached the end of her strength. “At last I could row no further,” she
begins. “My hands were blistered, my back was burned, my body ached” (5). Five
pages later, having landed on the island and been led by the wordless Friday to
meet Cruso, she explains her background to him before declaring, “Then at last
I could row no further. My hands were raw, my back was burned, my body ached”
(11). The changes to diction are slight, but the echo of the novel’s opening
lines is intentional and what has changed is Susan’s audience. At first it was
Foe, the reader of the letter; the next time it is Cruso within the scene and
Foe outside it. The description alters and, in its second incarnation, leads
elsewhere. In a novel that is itself a second incarnation that leads elsewhere,
this is no small gesture. Susan recasts her tale incessantly, if subtly, and
Coetzee absorbs into his narrative structure the generative power of stories,
how they reproduce and evolve, shifting slightly for each new audience.The effect is an open-ended model of
storytelling, in which the writer is free to explore an infinite number of
potential directions. In the context of a Defoe recasting, this mode is
surprising: it subverts any conventional wisdom about where this particular
novel, albeit attached to the characters and themes of Robinson Crusoe, is expected to go.

But
to Susan, who is not an experienced writer, the creative process is no poetic
affair of freedom, genius, or imagination. It boils down to a “matter of words
and the number of words” (94). At the same time, she seems caught between
contradictory impulses to satisfy both the writer (Foe) and the hypothetical
reader. She believes strongly in the necessity of meeting outside narrative
expectations; as she puts it, “the world expects stories from its adventurers”
(34). Though self-avowedly not a writer, she is a constant critic. She is
attuned to the dangers of vagueness in story and style and is wary of having
her story or her character overtaken by a familiar trope. She warns
Cruso—who in Coetzee’s version is noticeably not keeping a journal—that
“seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All
shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway” (18).
Originality is, after all, the guiding ethos of her desire to publish her
story. Yet even as she transmits her story to Foe so that he can recast it, she
begins to doubt her efforts. “I should have said less about him [Cruso], more
about myself,” she says, realizing that if the originality of her tale lies in
her sex, she forfeits it by giving narrative space to Cruso (51). Likewise she
also comes to question her selection of literary ally, asking herself whether
she was “wrong to choose Mr. Foe” (79). In these moments of regret, she
rewrites her own story before it has even reached print. By the end of the novel,
Susan has rejected any intrusion that is not strictly true, and she confronts
Foe with regard to her narrative wishes:

The story I desire to be known by is the
story of the island. You call it an episode, but I call it a story in its own
right. It commences with my being cast away there and concludes with the death
of Cruso and the return of Friday and myself to England, full of new hope.
Within this larger story are inset the stories of how I came to be marooned
(told by myself to Cruso) and of Cruso’s shipwreck and early years on the
island (told by Cruso to myself), as well as the story of Friday, which is
properly not a story but a puzzle or hole in the narrative … Taken in all, it
is a narrative with a beginning and an end, and with pleasing digressions too,
lacking only a substantial and varied middle, in the place where Cruso spent
too much time tilling the terraces and I too much time tramping the shores.
Once you proposed to supply a middle by inventing cannibals and pirates. These
I would not accept because they were not the truth. Now you propose to reduce
the island to an episode in the history of a woman in search of a lost
daughter. This too I reject.

Rightly for a novel
that borrows from its ancestor, originality becomes both a problem and a
solution. “The booksellers will hire a man to set your story to rights, and put
in a dash of color too, here and there,” the captain had told her (40). But the
issue of adding the dash of color creates the conflict on which all
relationships in the novel hinge. Susan’s story in print, meanwhile, which is
the desired object of Foe, becomes an
elusive thing, a phantom. She has her title ready: “The Female Castaway. Being
a True Account of a Year Spent on a Desert Island. With Many Strange
Circumstances Never Hitherto Related” (67). But in that book’s conspicuous
absence, we are left with concerns of tone, narrative strategy,
structure—all the architectural devices that bring a story to fruition.
Coetzee is using the rewriting form to show how novels get made, or not made:
the plot that takes over is the trajectory of the creative process. And given
that the creative process is unsuccessful in this case, the rewriting brings
literary anxiety to center stage.

There
is of course another phantom novel present in Foe, and that is the book we know as The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York,
Mariner. It is understood in the space of Coetzee’s novel that Robinson Crusoe does not yet exist as
such. The tale of the castaway called “Cruso” is only just making itself known,
through Susan’s rendering of it. But in her efforts to get Foe to write up her
story, Susan—though unwittingly—is already resisting the impulses
of Robinson Crusoe, and the reader
sees clearly the shadow it casts, even as Susan voices doubt about the merit of
her own contributions. “Are these enough strange circumstances to make a story
of?” she asks herself. “How long before I am driven to invent new and stranger
circumstances: the salvage of tools and muskets from Cruso’s ship; the building
of a boat, or at least a skiff, and a venture to sail to the mainland” (67).
These inventions she suggests are details present in Defoe’s text, but, through
Susan, Coetzee casts aspersions on them, as if to show that his revision is
only one in a line of such interferences. If Susan is right, then it was Defoe
who corrupted this tale from the outset. Coetzee’s own invention thus becomes a
multilayered project: he is elaborating Robinson
Crusoe, while within his book the characters themselves struggle against
its unarticulated (technically as yet unrealized) dominance.

Susan’s
resistance is most clearly expressed in a direct refutation of the seminal
image of Defoe’s work: the footprint discovered by Robinson Crusoe in the sand,
which haunts him for ten years until he has found and domesticated its owner.1
In Foe, Susan asserts, “I saw no
cannibals, and if they came after nightfall and fled before the dawn, they left
no footprint behind” (54). With this contradiction, the sense of authority in Foe gradually becomes diluted. Cruso’s
version of events (and, by extension, Defoe’s) vies for accuracy with Susan’s,
here presented as precisely the kind of empirical evidence that Coetzee, as we
shall later see, admires in Defoe—“All I say is: What I saw, I wrote”
—but no more necessarily believable than any other piece of fiction (54).

Likewise,
the writer himself struggles, literally, to embody authority. The image of Foe
spinning tales at his desk, untroubled by Susan’s prudish concerns about truth
and accuracy, suggests a remote, lofty man, out of tune with the events
happening around him. He wants to invent details, compress events, impose
structure. In the sense that he could theoretically accomplish those goals, he
is omnipotent. But if the writer is cast as powerful and godlike on the one
hand, he is on the other hand small and susceptible. A third of the way into
the book, Susan’s letters to Foe begin to be returned. She fears that he has
lost interest in her story; the reality is that Foe is in debt, his house has
been taken over by his creditors, and he has gone into hiding. The writer
proves vulnerable to real-world economies—a victim of gritty realism. The
author at work is portrayed not in some idealized creative environment but is
under threat of attack: from bill collectors, most prosaically, but also from
those persons we identify as his characters, perversely single-minded in
seeking completion of their narratives. “Will you continue to write our story
while you are in hiding?” Susan asks on hearing that Foe has taken flight (61).
“Will you not bear it in mind […] that my life is drearily suspended till your
writing is done?” (63). Foe is in one light a potential savior, and in another
light a petty criminal. Without the benefit of a retroactive, canonizing
perspective, literary talent does not translate into economic or social power.

And
fiction per se wields virtually no canonical power in the world of Foe. This is a historically accurate
point. To the extent that it exists as a genre, it would still be largely
considered a debased form. Pat Rogers points out in his reception history of Robinson Crusoe that “contemporary
readers were rebuked” for reading such works in place of Shakespeare or Ben
Jonson and quotes a 1725 essay describing the corrupting effects of the
“fabulous Adventures and Memoirs of Pirates, Whores, and Pickpockets” that
cites Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders by name (Rogers 128).
Coetzee’s Foe imagines fiction into being—a story based on a true
experience but refined into a pleasing aesthetic object, fabricated
specifically to grasp and hold a reader’s attention. This is how, in
retrospect, we take Robinson Crusoe.
But Defoe’s works initially gained popularity by masquerading as true accounts
with realistic consequences and moral imperatives.

Susan
desires the fame of a character in a true story, not an embellished one. But
whether in fiction or nonfiction, she understands that to live in print is to
be immortal—a belief that Coetzee’s novel endorses through its own
extended treatment of a literary character. Writing means nothing to the mute,
illiterate Friday, yet in anticipation of the publication of their story Susan
asks him, “Are you not filled with joy to know that you will live forever,
after a manner?” (58). She has grand plans for post-publication: Friday will go
back to Africa (the story is meant to reunite him with his past) and she, Susan,
will become a person of consequence: “Susan Barton the castaway’” (125). Thus,
her prevailing motivations are contradictory: the story will open up for her a
new chapter, setting her and Friday free from their period of island life and
all its attendant burdens, while at the same time she will tie herself in
perpetuity to the identity the story gives her. Immortality has its price.

However,
in truth, Susan’s identity is already tied to another story: Defoe’s Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress (1724).
Like the echoed beginnings that characterize Susan’s opening pages, the source
texts of Foe prove overlapping, the
protagonist of Roxana overlaid on the
template of Robinson Crusoe. It is a
layering device which, as we shall see, Coetzee employs to demonstrate that
responding to a classic is neither a simple nor direct proposition.

Susan
is introduced in Foe as a childless
mother. She arrives on the island having experienced parental trauma: the loss
of her daughter to kidnappers. When she returns to England, Susan is awkwardly
confronted by a young woman who claims to be her daughter and to bear her name
but who Susan insists is not hers. Whether bound by blood or not, they become a
mismatched pair, accentuating the loss on bothsides: orphanhood and childlessness. Susan’s rejection of the girl
who claims to be her daughter is noteworthy because it is couched in literary
terms. In her denial of the girl, as in her pursuit of Foe as ghostwriter, she
falls back on her own expectations as a reader. To her mind, the print
tradition is an authority, and though her own imperative to publish is partly
to do with the novelty of her own story—the originality and freshness of
the female castaway, a character she believes has not yet been undertaken in
print—she cannot accept that her own narrative of mother searching for
daughter could be so easily reversed. Her verdict is that the girl cannot be
hers because “there are no stories of daughters searching for mothers … they do
not occur” (77–78).

Here,
however, her instincts are amiss: the work of Defoe himself proves her wrong.
The young Susan Barton’s quest for her mother does follow a literary
plot—though admittedly not as familiar as the plot that brings together
Crusoe and Friday. It is from Defoe’s novel Roxana.
Roxana is the protagonist’s pseudonym; her real name, referenced but once or
twice in the novel, and then obliquely (even a careful reader is likely to miss
it), is Susan, as is her daughter’s. When the alleged daughter tells her tale,
it is the tale of Roxana’s daughter: the father’s abandonment of the family,
the mother’s destitution and reliance on her maidservant, Amy, to dispose of
her children (Foe 76).

If
there is no place in Foe for a
mother-daughter reunion, it is because parentage in the novel—such as it
exists—is exclusively patrilineal. Susan’s response to the mysterious
girl who claims her affection is that she is “father-born.” She means that her
father is Daniel Foe, for Susan suspects that this phantom daughter is merely a
character brought to life by Foe in order to provoke her into some kind of
narrative reunion and closure. The result is a picture of male authorial
begetting, one that implicates Coetzee’s novel as well as Foe’s, since Foe is of course also father-born,
engendered by Defoe’s novel. Biological reproduction seems off the cards here;
sex happens between Susan and Cruso, but it results in no children. When Susan
comes across a stillborn child on the road during her pilgrimage to meet Foe in
person, she unwraps it, discovers it’s a girl—another lost daughter, to
add to the novel’s tally—and leaves it behind (105). The finding of the
infant is just a red herring in the plot, as it toys with igniting Susan’s
maternal instinct only to shut that possibility down. But the child by the roadside,
itself another orphan, is emblematic of the difficulty exposed in Foe of bringing any creative endeavor to
life. No longer, Foe would have us
believe, is the novel engaged in idealizing or achieving the continuation of a
family, as it had in the Victorian novel, in which the survival and strength of
the child meant the survival and strength of the family, and metaphorically,
the nation; breathing life into such an institution is not something Foe can presume to do. Susan, as we have
seen, assumes that the only way to continue her legacy is in print. Once
diverted from her initial quest to find her lost daughter in the new world, she
discards her mission to reunite her family as a failure. The final verdict on
this subject comes near the end of Foe,
when the young Susan Barton and her nurse arrive at the house, and in the midst
of this confused and emotionally dry gathering Foe proclaims, “So we are all
together” (129). As Coetzee presents it, it is a hollow gesture, the writer
trying in vain to assemble a family.

The
possibility of conception and reproduction is instead shifted to the realm of
the literary—a realm in which mated novels give birth to new ones. On the
involvement of Roxana in the plot of Foe, Judie Newman notes that “Foe exposes its readers to the feeling
that we have assisted at the creation of a hybrid” (97). In that light, Foe is simply setting various plot
possibilities at work to see where they might end up, and Coetzee’s novel is
the breeding ground. The idea of a discrete canonical text is undermined
completely; as Spivak writes in her analysis of Foe, “It is as if the margins of bound books are themselves
dissolved into a general textuality” (163). In considering the thematic impact
of this blending, Newman relates it to Mary Douglas’s work on pollution in Purity and Danger, the idea of “dirt as
essentially disorder” (86).2 A self-proclaimed whore, albeit one who passes in genteel society, Roxana is an
embodiment of dirt by social standards; Susan Barton is more ambiguously so, as
an adventuress. Both are, in a certain sense, cast away. Newman also notes that
“after his death, Defoe’s novel [Roxana]
was itself rewritten: in 1740 (with a happy ending), in 1745 (ending
punitively), in 1775 (sentimentally) and in 1807, as a tragedy by William
Godwin” (98), thus showing it to have mothered new texts as Robinson Crusoe fathered them, though on
a much smaller scale.

For
Spivak, the intersection of Roxana
and Foe is the crossroads of race and
gender theory and cultural expression. Both Robinson
Crusoe and Roxana, she writes,
are “English texts in which the early eighteenth century tried to constitute
marginality.” In the former, “the white man marginalized in the forest
encounters Friday the savage in the margin”; in the latter, “the individualist
female infiltrates nascent bourgeois society.” Thus, Spivak concludes, “in
Coetzee’s novel, a double-gesture is performed. In the narrative, Roxana begins
her construction of the marginal where she is; but when her project approaches
fulfillment, the text steps in and reminds us that Friday is in the margin as
such, the wholly other” (157). This pairing illustrates a futility endemic to Foe that is separate from the
frustration of Susan’s vain attempt to get her book into print, though it is
enhanced by that device of stagnation in the plot: namely, that “the book may
be gesturing toward the impossibility of restoring the history of empire and
recovering the lost text of mothering in
the same register of language” (165, Spivak’s italics).

The
fact remains, though, that enfolding Roxana
into Foe is a curious move on
Coetzee’s part to begin with. Newman’s description of Foe as a hybrid of Defoe’s works is true, but what it does not
account for is the relative obscurity of Roxana
compared to Robinson Crusoe. The
reader can assist in the creation of a hybrid only if he or she recognizes the
second source, which, outside the academic sphere, is highly unlikely.3
If Friday is the character (or, perhaps more appropriately, the body) who
remains “wholly other,” in Spivak’s terms, he is on the other hand at least a
familiar figure to start with. In fact, the novel's central figures, Crusoe and
Friday, have transcended the page to become part of the cultural heritage of
the Western world; one does not need to have read Crusoe to know who they are. Roxana
can hardly lay claim to that kind of dissemination. By putting these characters
on an equal plane, Coetzee nods to the scholarly reader and notes that to
engage with a canonical author is to engage not in a one-on-one dialogue, but
in a conversation with multiple works, a model of collective reading that
mirrors institutional reading. No canonical work, Foe suggests, is fully isolatable. And for every canonical work
there may be at least one potential partner (by the same author, no less) that
exists in relative obscurity. The purpose of the rewriting is shifted, not
simply to reinvent the familiar but to show how the unfamiliar might logically,
easily, be reinstituted. The imperative is both to privilege scholarly reading
and to complicate interpretation of the original text or texts, rather than to
offer clarification or explanation, or a single alternative or competing point
of view.

Along
these lines, the use of Roxana also
introduces a complex narrative of plagiarism and illusion, as a response, in
part, to the question of how novelists get their ideas. For the majority of
readers, unfamiliar with Roxana, the
narrator Susan Barton would appear to be Coetzee’s invention, his modern
contribution to a centuries-old story, infusing the classic male encounter
between enlightenment and savagery with a plot that caters to feminist theory
and semiotics. To discover that she too is skillfully borrowed from a work of
Defoe’s is to throw the whole project of invention into question, a parallel to
the problem of invention that occupies the novel itself. Maximillian E. Novak
mentions Foe on the first page of the
introduction to his 2001 biography of the author in this context of plagiarism.
Defoe, he writes, had come under attack late in the eighteenth century, some
six decades after his death, for allegedly having fabricated RobinsonCrusoe from material of the sailor Alexander Selkirk, who published
a narrative of his own maritime adventures a few months before Robinson Crusoe appeared. With this fact
in mind, Novak reads Foe as including
“a playful modern version of the plagiarism theory […] in which Defoe has
stolen his work from his own creation, Roxana, who appears as Susan in the
text” (Novak 1). It is a self-reflexive and self-critical move for a novel that
openly acknowledges Robinson Crusoe.
It suggests as part of the moral of the story that to struggle with invention
is the peculiar province of the novel—that this difficulty, whether
writing or rewriting, is endemic to the very form.

Of
course, a scenario in which Roxana dreams up a castaway called Robinson Crusoe
and feeds his story to Daniel Defoe suggests the picture of a novelist living
wholly within a world of his imagining, an idea that strengthens the view of a
writer as a creative force shaping his own environment rather than casting
aspersions on his ability to find and follow through on ideas for fiction. In
this reading, there is neither character nor milieu, in Foe, that exists outside the mind of Daniel Defoe: the world is
made literature-centric—Defoe-centric, no less. But the question of
sources and source texts, in the form of Susan’s voluminous letters, is
certainly paramount in Foe, and the
interplay of multiple versions of the castaway narrative indicates that the
idea of pinpointing one origin, or one original, for the novel, let alone one
interpretation of it, is at best elusive. To rewrite in Coetzee’s terms is to
read widely, to assimilate, and to stretch the canon rather than contract or
entrench it—while at the same time to inhabit the collected works of a
writer, major and minor alike, rather than just one of them.

III

In
Foe, Coetzee not only envisions
re-writing canonical texts as a more complex intertextual enterprise but also
discovers that a version of the writer’s biography, an integral part of his
plot, is a crucial element of re-imagining the classic. In this regard,
Coetzee’s first move is to revert to Defoe’s surname by birth, Foe, for the
character in his book, which not only provides him with a set of handy
connotations but also represents a privileging of original over what one might
call embellishment. (Defoe added the “de” in an effort to retroactively bestow
an aristocratic connection to his family name.) In this way, as in others we have
already seen, Coetzee casts suspicion on his own project even as he builds it
up: if the original is to be privileged, what of such embellishments as Foe itself?

Coetzee
makes no claims to biography, but for precisely that reason the facets of Defoe’s
life that he chooses to highlight reveal the priorities of his version of the
story. He shows us not Defoe’s life—the decades of entrepreneurship,
political engagement, affectionate family life, and a writing career at the
forefront of the emerging forms of journalism and fiction—but the bleak
circumstances of his death: “away from his home, hiding from a creditor who had
the power to seize all his goods and throw him into prison for debt” (Novak, Daniel Defoe 6). Coetzee strips this
lamentable situation further, for though Defoe had a wife and eight children,
the Foe we see is alone, and he radiates solitude beyond any temporary absence
on the part of his family. In the setting of his home and workplace there is no
evidence that he might have been a family man. Coetzee draws attention to the
lack: “What has happened to your sons and daughters?” asks Susan Barton in a
parenthetical midway through the novel. “Could they not be trusted to shelter
you from the law?” (95).

The
effect of this isolation of Defoe is twofold. First, it is part of the
deliberate obscuring of the novel’s temporal setting. The events of Foe would seem to take place during one
of Defoe’s bankruptcy crises; there were two, in 1692 and in 1703 (Novak 75).
On the other hand, the young woman who claims to be Susan Barton’s daughter
gives her birth year as 1702, which would put the action about eighteen years
later, right around the time of Crusoe’s
publication. Other details having to do with where Foe is in his writing career
contradict any attempt to pin down the year in question. Either one of the
bankruptcy periods would far predate the writing and publication of Robinson Crusoe, suggesting a period of
germination in which the author gets the idea for the masterwork during the
time frame of the book but years go by before he successfully implements it.
The inspiration and evolution of the canonical work would thus be privileged
over its ultimate appearance; process would be privileged over result. And
Susan’s reasons for choosing Foe as her ghostwriter are thrown into question;
Attridge notes that “One effect of this chronological uncertainty, germane to
the novel’s concerns, is that it remains unclear whether Foe’s reputation is as
a reporter of fact or, as was the case only later in Defoe’s career, a creator
of fiction” (78 note). Research for works in both genres seems already to have
been completed: at Foe’s home, Susan finds papers that include “a census of the
beggars of London, bills of mortality from the time of the great plague, accounts
of travels in the border country, … also books of voyages to the New World,
memoirs of captivity among the Moors, chronicles of the wars in the Low
Countries, confessions of notorious lawbreakers, and a multitude of castaway
narratives, most of them, I would guess, riddled with lies” (Foe 50). These tantalizing pages are the
building blocks of Defoe’s oeuvre, fiction and fact: Moll Flanders, Journal of the
Plague Year, and Tour Through the
Whole Island of Great Britain, as well as the numerous pamphlets, essays
and poems for which he became famous and infamous during his lifetime. The
point of all this confusion over Defoe’s age and experience—Foe, after all, does not present itself
as a biographical document or reflection of Defoe’s actual career—is that
the author figure is separated from his historical milieu, a fact that comes
into play vividly in the novel’s ending, in which we are all at sea as to what
time it is.

In
obscuring the time period of his work, Coetzee also works against the text of Robinson Crusoe, in which the passage of
time in all its banality is diligently documented by the protagonist: first in
a journal that tracks events and the weather from day to day and later, when
ink begins to be in short supply, becoming expansively conscious of the passing
of seasons and years, remarking on long-term accomplishments, “in about a Year
and a half I had a Flock of about twelve Goats” (148). Coetzee’s Cruso, as
aforementioned, keeps no journal; as Spivak observes, he “has no interest in
keeping time” (161). In stripping both Cruso and Foe of the power that comes
with noting and shaping the passage of time, Coetzee undercuts the form of the
original novel and undermines the trope of imperial power achieved through
archival intelligence and record-keeping. This, after all, is one of the themes suggested
by Crusoe’s naming of Friday, a gesture at once supremely rational, since he
arrives in Crusoe’s life on a Friday, and absurd, since we all come into the
world on a day of the week but few of us become that day’s namesake. Susan
lodges for a while in Clock Lane, and she chides Cruso while still on the
island for not keeping a journal and not, by extension, keeping track of time.
But the thrust of Coetzee’s novel is against such documentation, as we see from
his suspension of the character of Foe in biographical limbo. It is
antirealist, from that point of view, and antiempirical; it transcends time,
like a ready-made classic.4

The
second result of Foe’s isolation has less to do with time than with space. The
removal of Foe’s family provides a void into which a different kind of family
can enter. In Coetzee’s tableau of the writer’s life, Foe’s only companions are
the selection of his own characters who cluster around him, whether by their
will or his summons—Susan Barton, Friday, and the maid Amy and young
Susan of Roxana. His life consists of
the fruits of his imagination, which from our point of view is the truth about
a canonical writer—he is lumped forever in association with his
characters—but which brings him no worldly solace in his moment. For
within the world of his invention, the writer may exert great power, but
Coetzee shows us that in the larger bounds of Foe, there is no value—at least, not yet—in the
author’s work. Foe’s writing has no purchasing power in the market. When Susan,
on the road in pursuit of the writer in hiding, attempts to barter a bound copy
of a book by Foe, the cobbler insists on another volume instead. Critics have
pointed to Defoe’s preoccupation with accounts as characteristic of his fiction
and nonfiction, and certainly, reading Robinson
Crusoe and Roxana, one gets the
impression of protagonists constantly tallying their assets.5 Their progression through each novel has an acquisitive imperative—one
that ultimately pervades the entire genre, from Austen on, by thematizing the
gaining or losing of assets through marriage and inheritance. If the
inheritance plot began with such accounting, peaking in the nineteenth century
and receding in the twentieth, then we might understand rewritings as reviving
it in a figurative mode, enacting and capitalizing on the inheritance of the
canon’s most valuable asset: its stories.

IV

A
reader who comes to Robinson Crusoe
with knowledge of this particular canonical asset—the story of the
castaway Crusoe and his faithful man—might expect Friday to enter the
action far earlier than he does. In fact he comes in about two-thirds of the
way through the book, after Crusoe has already spent decades on the island.
This is not to say that readers are incorrect to identify the relationship of
Friday and Crusoe as the key to the novel’s registers of human emotion and
connection, its political and imperial commentary, its theological bent, and
most other significant topics, for on Friday’s entrance the text pivots from a
study of isolation, fear, and survival to one of companionship, strategy, and
mastery. It is simply a question of reminding ourselves that for much of the
original text, Friday is most conspicuous by his absence. Earlier in the
novel’s own history, it was read accordingly (Rogers 138–39).

Coetzee’s
revisions both to the character of Crusoe and to the novel’s plot draw out
these differences. Coetzee’s castaway is about sixty years old—which
makes him older than his literary forebear Crusoe and “roughly Defoe’s age at
the time when his novel was published” —nor is he at all concerned with
getting off the island (Thieme 64). He is a more primitive presence, “an
illustration of the futility of Empire” rather than an exultation of its
strengths (Newman 96). By the time Foe begins,
Cruso’s strength is sapped; shortly thereafter he makes his exit, while Friday
remains physically present throughout. As Thieme argues, Foe “refuses to see the Friday–Crusoe connection as central”
(69). But Susan’s constant reference to the hole in the narrative created by
Friday’s muteness is in a certain sense of a piece with the original work, in
which, at least in terms of page count, Friday’s role is not central either.

Another
point of continuity between the eighteenth- and the twentieth-century Friday is
the narrative of liberation that surrounds him. In each case, however, it is
used toward different ends. In the seminal scene of Defoe’s work, Friday
appears as one of two captives of a group of barbarous savages.6
As his companion goes before the knife, Friday takes his chance for escape, and
because he happens to head toward Crusoe, Crusoe becomes his refuge. Crusoe
also takes his chance, deeming this the long-awaited opportunity to “get me a
Servant, and perhaps a Companion, or Assistant”—in that order; he shoots
Friday’s pursuers and casts himself as his savior, “call’d plainly by
Providence to save this poor Creature’s Life” (203).7At first it is Crusoe who is mute, making signs, while Friday speaks words in
his own language. After this meeting, Friday as we know him is born, his new
name marking his rebirth. In the same sentence Crusoe also renames himself;
henceforth, he is “Master.” And henceforth, Crusoe does the talking and Friday
the learning: “I began to speak to him, and teach him to speak to me” (206).

Though
Friday proves “the aptest Schollar that ever was” and becomes adept enough to
engage Crusoe in theological and philosophical discussions (in pidgin English,
but wholly comprehensible), what happens at the point of their encounter to
Friday’s native tongue is what happens literally to the tongue of Coetzee’s
Friday—it is cut off (211). Friday does, however, find cause to revert to
his own language three years after meeting Crusoe, when at the end of a raid
against further incursions of savages he comes across the only character who
could rival Crusoe in demanding his filial affection: his biological father. A
Spaniard is also added to the party, and Friday serves as “interpreter” (Crusoe’s
word) among the four men, translating not only his father’s speech but also
that of the Spaniard, “for the Spaniard spoke the Language of the Savages
pretty well” (242). It is apparently not beyond the capacity of a European to
learn the native language, therefore, but the reader infers that Crusoe has
chosen not to do so.

Equally
important, he chooses not to teach Friday to read. This is a curious point. It
emerges after Crusoe has recorded for posterity his dialogues with Friday about
good and evil in the world, and Friday—acting the role of the noble
savage—has through such inquiries as “why God no kill the Devil?”
inspired Crusoe to think further about his mission vis-à-vis this companion:
having saved Friday’s life, he must also save his soul (219). They proceed to
spend a peaceful three years, as Defoe’s account has it, in thought-provoking
conversation. But Crusoe, glad though he is to have a body to talk to, reserves
the written word for himself. He remains the medium between Friday and the
Bible.

I always apply’d my self in Reading the
Scripture, to let him know, as well as I could, the Meaning of what I read; and
he again, by his serious Enquiries, and Questionings, made me, as I said
before, a much better Scholar in the Scripture Knowledge, than I should ever
have been by my own private meer Reading.

As this passage
demonstrates, despite Crusoe’s assertion of inclusivity his reading is kept
“private.” Why, in all those years, does Crusoe not teach Friday to read
English as well as to speak and understand it? Is it because Robinson Crusoe predates an era of
widespread literacy, whether along class or race lines? The question of oral
language is well addressed in Defoe’s story; the question of literacy remains a
puzzle.

In
Coetzee’s version, it is Susan—herself struggling for
liberation—who would save Friday from his would-be captors and teach him
to communicate. She hangs the success of her story on it: “The true story will
not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday”
(118). But here Friday—whose English in the original may sound naive but
who is nevertheless savvy enough to register skepticism with some of the basic
tenets of Christianity—cannot speak at all, even in his own language. He
can fill neither the role of the vocal savage nor the role of interpreter, both
of which were legitimate parts for him in Defoe’s work. Susan speculates
further that Friday’s “lost tongue might stand not only for itself but for a
more atrocious mutilation,” i.e. castration (119). With these missing organs in
mind, her priority is to fill the void they leave behind, making a whole man of
Friday, whether by giving him a voice with which to speak his story or by
giving him independence, in the emancipation papers she hangs around his neck
like a replacement appendage. These strategies are so symbolically
overdetermined that they seem destined for failure, and indeed Susan judges
them as such (142).

But
there is another way to bring Friday into the narrative, and that is to give
him literacy—not the power to speak, but the power to read and write. Not
surprisingly, the idea comes from the novel’s writer in residence. “Have you
shown him writing?” asks Foe, when Susan has lamented the failure of her
efforts with Friday. To her objection “How can he write if he cannot speak?” he
replies, “Writing is not doomed to be the shadow of speech” (142). And so the
main narrative of the book (excepting the final few pages, in which the setting
and narrator shift) ends with Friday’s reading and writing lesson, in which,
dressed in Foe’s robes and wig, deploying his pens, and sitting at the famed
author’s desk, he begins by writing the letter o. Whether this o is, as
some critics have suggested, the Greek letter omega, indicating that in the end
Friday must find his beginning (Newman 102), or an echo of what in Robinson Crusoe are Friday’s prayers
(which he refers to in his vernacular English as “saying O” [Spivak 171]) or a
self-portrait, the representation of his open, soundless mouth, is not made clear.
But whatever the case, Friday’s rows of circles on a slate are the last piece
of writing we read in the body of a book whose unwavering goal is to bring to
fruition a piece of writing.

It
may be that Friday will never make himself heard, and that Coetzee’s novel, in
assuming that troubled postcolonial position, accords Friday even less agency
than he possessed in the colonial age. But this image of Friday filling Defoe’s
role—especially in a book in which the story at hand, Susan’s story,
markedly fails to get written—may be interpreted as compensation, opening
up any number of rich interpretations of the power he might assume as a writer
and a reader. Many critics have taken Friday’s silence in the novel as proof
that Coetzee will not presume to speak for the black African’s
experience—Thieme, for example, notes that the one thing Foe refuses to do is “to speak for black
subjectivity” —and this view is well supported by Coetzee’s reluctance
either to fill Friday’s silence in interviews or otherwise explain his
characters, or even to speak for himself (69).8But the image of Foe in Defoe’s robes, imitating his actions, is a more
powerful gesture than any words might offer. It may be that in the model of
mimicry suggested by Homi Bhabha—in which the mimic man, the colonial
man, instructed in the culture of his imperialist oppressor, is necessarily a
lesser version of that master, kept all the more segregated by the slippage
that accompanies crude imitation—Friday makes a poor Defoe and can never
gain his authority.9
But his donning of Defoe’s clothes and his taking up of Defoe’s pen serves the
purpose of equating him with another writer of inarguable cultural standing:
Coetzee. Both are sitting at Defoe’s desk, making free use of his materials. So
long as he can read and write, Friday need not speak at all. And if he must be
consigned to mimicry, then Coetzee willingly consigns himself as well.

V

Seventeen
years after the publication of Foe,
the figures of Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe still loomed large enough in
Coetzee’s imagination to provide the basis for his 2003 Nobel lecture, an
elliptical meditation on myths of solitude and enlightenment (and, strangely,
duck migration) titled “He and His Man.” The talk centers on the story of a
castaway and is prefaced by a quotation from Defoe’s novel that describes how
Crusoe taught Friday to speak—that is, to speak English. Defoe’s style is
evident as an influence throughout the address, and portions of it are loosely
quoted from his nonfiction masterpieces Tour
Through the Whole Island of Great Britain and Journal of the Plague Year, but the English setting of Bristol and
the obscurity of the narrative device preclude any straightforward
interpretation of the piece as dealing with Crusoe and Friday, as the title “He
and His Man” would suggest (Attridge 196). In fact, the situation is far more
complicated. “His man” is less servant than reporter, noting all that he sees
around him. And “he” is the recipient of these notes: “He (not his man now but he) sits in his room by the
waterside in Bristol and reads this” (par. 11). Moreover, “he” is also a
version of Robinson Crusoe, as we learn from mention of the parrot that “came
back with him,” who used to squawk “Poor Robin Crusoe!” (par. 12). It turns out
that “his man” is in fact an invention of his own solitude, a figure he has
written into being to spur his own composition, thus blurring the lines between
reader and writer, author and character. This figure walks among the pages of
others of Defoe’s works. And, because “he” is Robinson Crusoe, he must contend
with those who have made their own character out of him:

When the first
bands of plagiarists and imitators descended upon his island history and
foisted on the public their own feigned stories of the castaway life, they
seemed to him no more or less than a horde of cannibals falling upon his own
flesh, that is to say, his life; and he did not scruple to say so. When I defended myself against the
cannibals, who sought to strike me down and roast me and devour me, he
wrote, I thought I defended myself
against the thing itself. Little did I guess, he wrote, that these cannibals were but figures of a
more devilish voracity, that would gnaw at the very substance of truth.

But now,
reflecting further, there begins to creep into his breast a touch of
fellow-feeling for his imitators. For it seems to him now that there are but a
handful of stories in the world; and if the young are to be forbidden to prey
upon the old then they must sit for ever in silence. (par. 34–35,
Coetzee’s italics)

Thus he comes to
terms with the idea that his story will be told and retold by others, and that
neither he nor his fictitious man is powerful enough to stop it, nor should
they stop it if they could. The lecture concludes with an attempt on the part
of Crusoe to cast himself and his man into relation: are they “master and
slave,” “comrades in arms,” or “enemies, foes”? (par. 40). The identity he
settles on is strangers.

In
1999, Coetzee published an introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition
of Robinson Crusoe. In this far more
concrete commentary on the novel, he argues for an interpretation of Defoe as
an “impersonator, a ventriloquist, even a forger […] The kind of ‘novel’ he is
writing (he did not of course use the term) is a more or less literal imitation
of the kind of recital his hero or heroine would have given had he or she
really existed” (vii). And though Coetzee maintains that Robinson Crusoe is not Defoe’s best book (“Moll Flanders is more consistent in its execution; Roxana, though uneven, rises to greater
heights”), he credits the empiricism that is Defoe’s brand of realism: “For
page after page—for the first time in the history of fiction—we see
a minute, ordered description of how things are done. It is a matter of pure
writerly attentiveness, pure submission to the exigencies of a world which,
through being submitted to in a state so close to spiritual absorption, becomes
transfigured, real” (viii–ix). Together, these two pieces demonstrate
that Coetzee’s interest in Robinson
Crusoe remains firmly rooted—as it was in the writing of Foe—in the problems of
originality, imitation, and plagiarism. With the production of something
original comes the ever present threat of theft or appropriation, but if Defoe
himself can be read as a forger, then it is far more difficult to pinpoint
where the original originates.

The
ending of Foe, which long precedes
these two essays on Robinson Crusoe,
remains the most ambiguous textual commentary of them all. This is in large
part because in the final section the unities of the novel give way entirely.
Time hurtles forward, and the narrator changes shape from Susan Barton to an
unidentified and ungendered “I.” That the setting bears relation to what has
transpired in the preceding narrative is established by the opening sentence,
“The staircase is dark and mean”; it is the present-tense version of the
sentence that opens section three of the novel, when Susan tracks down Foe in
Bristol, where he has taken refuge from his creditors. This new narrator,
walking through a silent house, stumbles over the body of a woman or girl that
“weighs no more than a sack of straw,” then discovers two more dead bodies, a
woman and a man. The house, we take it, is that of the author Foe; the first
body may be that of the alleged daughter; the pair are apparently Susan Barton
and Foe himself. Friday’s body, not dead but not quite living, barely
registering a pulse, is also there, and “from his mouth, without a breath,
issue the sounds of the island” (154).

After
a section break, the scene repeats, this time with a clue as to location: a
plaque on the outside of the house reads “Daniel Defoe, Author.” The shift to
“Defoe” puts distance between this historical figure and the man we knew as
Foe, while the plaque’s designation of author
retroactively bestows the professional identity that Coetzee shows in its
nascent, porous stages in the body of Foe.
(If, as Coetzee notes in “Speaking in Tongues,” the profession was “just
beginning to mean something in Daniel Defoe’s day”, it now means enough to
stand in apposition to his name.) The additional writing on the plaque would
doubtless help clarify the setting, but it is unfortunately “too small to
read.” A later reference to the “mud of Flanders, in which generations of
grenadiers now lie dead, trampled in the postures of sleep” (156) suggests that
we are in the twentieth century. Again the narrator stumbles over the body of a
woman or a girl; again he comments that it is “light as straw” (155). The
repetition calls to mind the doubling back of Susan’s narrative at the
beginning of the book; it is an echo of an echo, or another series of false
starts. As in that case, there are subtle changes in diction and action the
second time around. Now Friday’s face is “turned to the wall,” and there is a
scar visible around his neck, “left by a rope or chain” (155)—the chain
signifies slavery, the rope evokes those emancipation papers with which Susan
simultaneously liberated and burdened her companion.

Now
the narrator turns up evidence of the house’s inhabitants and of their relation
to the story that preceded his entry: a box containing a manuscript that begins
“Dear Mr. Foe, At last I could row no further” (155). It is the opening letter
of Foe, still unpublished, but with the
missing salutation filled in, altering the start of the novel even as it moves
toward its ending. For readers, it is a bona fide literary discovery—the
complete, original manuscript of the novel they hold in their hands. By this
time, the house has mysteriously transformed into a ship: the narrator slips
overboard and is surrounded by “the petals cast by Friday”—a reference to
the occasional forays Friday made from the island into the water, scattering
petals in what Susan hypothesized might be an offering to the gods. Ensconced
at the scene of the castaway drama, the narrator descends into the wreck of a
ship, and reaches a cabin at the bulkhead.

In the black space of this cabin the water is still and dead, the same water
as yesterday, as last year, as three hundred years ago. Susan Barton and her
dead captain, fat as pigs in their white nightclothes, their limbs extending
stiffly from their trunks, their hands, puckered from long immersion, held out
in blessing, float like stars against the low roof. (156–57)

This is a
counterfactual of Foe in which Susan
never reaches Cruso’s island. It is precisely the counterfactual that would
clear the way for the story of Robinson
Crusoe, with no female castaway joining the archetypal male survivor. In a
corner of the submerged ship’s cabin is Friday, who again is not quite living
but not quite dead. His presence prompts the narrator’s elemental
question—“what is this ship?”—and his wordless response engenders
the narrator’s verdict on this strange scene. “But this is not a place of
words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and
diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of
Friday” (157).

It
is fair to say that these final few pages have baffled readers across the
board, though attempts have been made by scholars to comprehend them. Their
readings tend toward descriptions of what the ending is not. Spivak, though she
observes that the section is “lovingly written,” is skeptical of its intent,
citing its implicit wish of “if only there were no texts” as indicative of the
“impossible politics of overdetermination,” for “Coetzee’s entire book warns
that Friday’s body is not its own sign” (174). Attridge, who detects in the
passage’s diction echoes of the shipwreck scenes in The Tempest, argues that “the narrator of the closing section (what
name do we use?—Susan Barton, Daniel Foe, Daniel Defoe, J. M.
Coetzee, our own?) has made the last of many attempts to get Friday to speak,
and the hauntingly allusive description of the soundless stream issuing from
his body is a culmination of the book’s concern with the powerful silence which
is the price of our cultural achievements” (67). Thieme reads the section as
evidence that the text “resists closure” on the note of liberal affirmation
that characterizes Friday’s first reading and writing lesson under the tutelage
of Susan and Foe.10 Newman cites a reference to Adrienne
Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” “to salvage what meanings survive from the
old myths of patriarchy,” which she notes “chimes with Susan Barton’s desperate
quest for her own identity”; the diver, meanwhile, is able to conquer the taboo
on mutilation and touch Friday at last (100). Newman also observes that “at the
close of the novel the reader is re-reading,” which prompts her opinion that
the novel “is not about the need to avoid telling the black story; rather it
concerns the necessity for repeated efforts to overcome divisions and
categorizations,” specifically, in her reading, apartheid (102).

I
will close with a new suggestion for what the ending is. Diving into the wreck
may read as a purely figurative activity, the more so for its evocation of the
Adrienne Rich poem of that title, which does share in explicating some of the
gender issues raised by Foe and its
female castaway, who struggles in vain to communicate her story. But a more
concrete connection exists between the wreck and the subject matter at hand.
For Defoe, the possibility of salvaging wealth from below was more than a
metaphor. Defoe’s two major brushes with bankruptcy occurred on the heels of
two bad investments. The first involved a civet-cat farm for the purposes of
making perfume. The second was an investment in a submersible diving engine
used to search sunken ships for treasure. It was developed by Joseph Williams,
“who experimented with such a machine in May 1691 off the coast of Scotland”
(Novak 95). Defoe lost two hundred pounds in shares backing Williams’s diving
machine and incurred the wrath of his creditors, but despite that setback he
remained optimistic well into the eighteenth century that such a machine would
bear fruit. He alludes to them in an appendix to his letter “From London to
Land’s End” (published in Volume I of his Tour
Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1724–26), which he wrote
on the occasion of a visit to the rocks of Scilly, on the western side of the
island, where shipwrecks were a way of life.

Here, also, as a farther
testimony of the immense riches which have been lost at several times upon this
coast, we found several engineers and projectors—some with one sort of
diving engine, and some with another; some claiming such a wreck, and some
such-and-such others; where they alleged they were assured there were great
quantities of money; and strange unprecedented ways were used by them to come
at it: some, I say, with one kind of engine, and some another; and though we
thought several of them very strange impracticable methods, yet I was assured
by the country people that they had done wonders with them under water, and
that some of them had taken up things of great weight and in a great depth of
water. (106)

Diving into the
wreck, then, in pursuit of “things of great weight and in a great depth of
water,” is an avocation in which Defoe took a marked interest over a sustained
period of his life.

It
is hard to overlook the poetic nature of this particular obsession of Defoe’s.
(It is easier, admittedly, to overlook the civet cats.) If the final episode of
Foe is not drawn from Coetzee’s
acquaintance with this failed investment—though the emphasis he grants to
Defoe’s financial crises makes it likely that he knew of the
connection—then at the very least the coincidence is symbolically
evocative.11
It is Coetzee’s way of rewriting what was a poor return for Defoe, suggesting
that however faint the hope of recompense, the exploration of the wreck and the
attempt to get something out of Friday are tasks both readers and writers
(either of whom can fill the role of “I” in the final section) must keep performing.
What is at stake—the treasures that lie below—are stories and
counterfactuals and works that exist in hidden counterpoint to canonical works,
like the manuscript of Susan Barton. Yet it would seem, given the close reading
of Robinson Crusoe and Roxana in which Foe engages, that in Coetzee’s opinion one way to reach the
treasures in the wreck is through canonical study, by rereading those works and
writers we think we know best. One of the lessons of Foe (which is indisputably a novel with lessons) is that
biographical inquiry is an essential facet of canonical knowledge, that close
reading of the text must expand into the life, mind, and circumstance of the
author behind it. Spivak refers to Foe
as a “didactic aid”; her essay on the novel is an exercise in pedagogy, a
discussion of how she uses it to teach (157). My interpretation of the ending
has more to do with what it teaches readers as a parable of reading, and of
rereading, which is precisely what the false starts that bookend the novel
direct us to do. The interplay of the biographical does not negate any of the
thematic or allusive readings noted above, but it offers up the historical
figure of the author and his preoccupations as a subject equally worthy of
allusion and study. Surely that is a comment as weighty as gestures toward
Shakespeare and Adrienne Rich on how writers, as well as their works, can enter
the canon, in the days when to be an author is unequivocally to embrace a
profession, one utterly worldly yet somehow still divine.